Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years

by Allie Cresswell

  I voiced my fears to Rose, who smiled, and told me that even the crustiest old die-hards had soft hearts and I should not worry - I’d win them over in the end. ‘Those folks in the new houses won’t even know who you are,’ she said. ‘You aren’t as famous as you think.’

  Rose and I agreed I could be introduced as an impoverished member of the Talbot family living by grace and favour at the house as housekeeper and guardian. As for the finger-waggers, I decided I would endure their vinegary looks and self-righteous sniffing, and hold my head high.

  It was much more difficult than I had imagined. As I entered, the village hall was full and the meeting was in progress. At the creak of the door the Chairlady’s spiel of notices and matters arising stammered to a halt. There was massed swivelling of heads, an audible gasp of surprise and a collected raising of eyebrows. The woman serving tea dropped the milk jug. I made much of removing my gloves and stowing them in my handbag, all the while scanning the rows of smartly hatted heads for Rose or Mrs Greene. The silence disintegrated into shocked exchanges of ‘Well, did you ever?’ and ‘Of all the nerve!’ I wanted the wooden floor to open up and swallow me whole.

  Then I was yoo-hooed to a spare chair at the end of a row by Rose, introduced to her mother and welcomed very pointedly by Mrs Greene, which flabbergasted the tart contingent into silence. Then Miss Eccles, the school teacher, thundered the first chords of Jerusalem, and we all began to sing.

  Membership of the WI opened up my circle of acquaintances to include Rose’s mother, Patricia Coombes, whose husband ran the village pub, and Ann Widderington, wife of a local farmer. Rose’s mother was an older, weightier replica of her daughter, all smiles and dimples and generous spirit. Patricia was a large, busty woman, landlady of the local pub. Although her husband held the licence and was nominally in charge, everyone knew it was really Patricia who ruled the roost. She was very loud, with blonde hair fading to ashy grey. Regular customers treated her with great respect and more than a little awe. But no one had a kinder heart. ‘So you’ve decided to show yer face at last,’ she cried, ‘’bout time too. You sit near me and try this cake. Baked it m’self. Doesn’t touch Mrs Greene’s but someone’s got to eat it.’ I liked her immediately in spite of the cake (which was soggy and under-baked) and for her part she seemed determined to take me under her wing. ‘You call in to the pub any time,’ she told me. ‘You don’t have to go through the bar. Come through the gate into the yard and hammer on the door. Don’t worry about the dog - he’s all noise but he’s got no teeth, like those women yonder,’ she indicated, with a nod of her head, a coven of ladies across the room deeply engaged in conversation which was punctuated by frequent sallies of withering looks in my direction.

  I encountered Ann Widderington very briefly, the first time, after the meeting. Her bicycle chain had come off and she was trying to fix it by the side of the road. She was a tiny, wiry woman, nervous as a bird. Her small hands were oily and she had a smear of dirt across her face. Even in the pale moonlight I could see she was flushed and anxious. ‘I’ll have to leave it in the hedgerow,’ she said as I came up to her. ‘Jethro will be angry if I’m home late; he likes his cocoa promptly at nine.’ With that she almost threw the bicycle into the ditch alongside the hedge, and scampered off down the narrow farm track which led to Clough Farm.

  ‘People say he hits her,’ Rose confided when I reported the strange incident to her. ‘Jethro Widderington is known as a bully; my Dad remembers him from school - he was handy with his fists even then.’

  ‘Poor woman,’ I said, ‘I wonder why she married him.’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ Rose threw me a cryptic look, ‘the usual reason. Not everyone has a Mum and Dad as good as mine.’

  I wanted to ask her about Bobby then. Who was his father? But, for all I knew she could have succumbed to an attack as easily as a seduction. Both were delicate areas, as I well knew, and so I did not trespass upon them.

  Ann’s bicycle gave me an idea, and I asked Kenneth to get me one and show me how to ride it, so I could cycle up to the village and back again, in the light summer evenings. Pedalling up the drive was very hard work, but free-wheeling down again was wonderful!

  The bicycle widened still further my sphere of independence and society. Kenneth was assiduous in his tuition, showing me the unfrequented green lanes and farm tracks which cut across country and saved me from encountering both the traffic and the ambling herds and flocks on the roads. It was exhilarating to ride with the wind in my face, to see the fields and moors over the hedgerows. We might stop by a rushing stream to drink from cupped hands, or gather blackberries to take home. Kenneth’s reserve relaxed a little. He spoke, still, in stilted sentences, and never wasted words, but those he spoke were always interesting and apposite. He knew a good deal about local wildlife, pointed out birds’ nests and named wild flowers. When I talked, he listened, answering with a nod or a noise which came out as ‘hmm’ but which, depending on the facial expression which accompanied it, could mean approbation, agreement, denial or censure. Sometimes I even made him smile, and, at those moments, a kind of cloud which hovered around him like a hazy shield would lift, just briefly, and the boy I had known years before with a gap-toothed grin and a merry glint in his hazel eye would be visible.

  I took advantage of one of these windows to remind him of our childhood association. ‘You looked after me, when I was very small,’ I commented one afternoon as we lazed on the periphery of a meadow in the shadow of a towering horse chestnut tree.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. He was lying on his back with his hands behind his head.

  ‘Do you remember?’ I pressed.

  He didn’t reply for a moment. ‘Course,’ he said at last. ‘Got the push for it.’

  ‘From Ratton?’

  He shook his head. ‘Ratton wasn’t there then. Your father. Said it wouldn’t do.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, sincerely. It seemed to me that Kenneth had had the short end of many straws.

  ‘He was right. But you were lonely.’

  ‘I was,’ I agreed. ‘When did you begin working at the house?’

  ‘My father was coachman. Brought me when I was a nipper. Been going ever since.’

  ‘Whether allowed or not?’ I laughed.

  He gave a rueful grin but then frowned, as though puzzling something out for himself before he spoke. ‘That house,’ he said at last, ‘times gone, it belonged to the village as much as the Talbots. Everyone worked there, or were tenants, or supplied something.’

  I knew exactly what he meant - Tall Chimneys didn’t belong just to the Talbots and my role in maintaining it wasn’t just for the sake of my family’s traditions and history but also for the local community’s. Their stake was as great as mine.

  ‘It sustained the local economy,’ I agreed, ‘I wish those days would come back.’

  ‘But they won’t,’ he sighed. He squinted at the sky. A thin cloud hazed the far horizon. ‘Going to rain,’ he said, getting up and holding out his hand to me. ‘Better get back.’

  When he was satisfied I would not get lost or fall off the bicycle, Kenneth agreed to my going out alone. It was ridiculous for a woman of my years - I was twenty six - to feel at once, so excited and so nervous about being independent, but I did. I had kept myself apart at Tall Chimneys in the early years because I had believed that was the traditional way of things - that strict demarcation, between landed gentry and the hoi-polloi. In the first part of the century no decent lady would have thought of going out unchaperoned and although times had moved on, I hadn’t. I had been left behind by progress, marooned by time, like Tall Chimneys itself; we were both relics of history. Following the commencement of my liaison with John I had even hidden there, feeling the stigma of our adultery which, though I could justify it to myself, I knew would fail the strict test of prevailing morality. But now I found I was tolerated and even welcomed by most people in the village and my conversation with Kenneth had reminded me I had a responsibility
to the local community. I took to cycling up there to use the post office and little shop, and to have tea with Patricia in the little parlour behind the bar.

  Rose’s mother asked me to tea also. ‘Three or four of us get together on Wednesday afternoons for a knitting circle,’ she said. ‘It’s half day closing. Why don’t you come?’

  ‘I can’t knit!’ I confessed.

  ‘I’ll teach you,’ she laughed.

  Rose came with me. Kenneth had agreed to keep his eye on Bobby for the afternoon. ‘We don’t go to the front door,’ Rose warned me, as I made for the gate off the main street pavement. ‘Nobody but the vicar and the bailiff ever uses those. We’ll go round the back.’

  I followed her past a neatly kept vegetable patch and a line full of drying washing and was welcomed into a warm kitchen where I was given tea and a slice of cherry pie, and handed a pair of knitting needles ready cast-on with coarse yarn.

  ‘A dish cloth,’ I was told, ‘the ideal beginner’s project.’ I tussled with it as time passed, only half concentrating, enjoying the companionable chat of the women and finding I had fewer and fewer stitches and larger and larger holes as the afternoon progressed.

  Emboldened by this experience of local society, one warm afternoon I ventured down to Clough Farm to visit Ann. The farm was tidy and well-maintained, the yard clear of the usual decrepit pieces of machinery and half tumble-down lean-tos which usually characterise them. The farmhouse was neat and recently white-washed. Tubs of geraniums stood either side of the front door but I knew better, now, than to knock on it, and found my way instead round to the kitchen door. Ann was suspicious at first, peering from behind the almost-closed door like a timid mouse. I made that first visit on the pretext of having heard her henhouse had been raided by a fox. I took her three pullets in a box balanced on my handlebars. She didn’t even let me in the house on that occasion, but because I had been told at the WI that she was the best knitter in the group I went again, with a tangled attempt at a tea cosy, to ask her help. She invited me in that time - it transpired Jethro was away all day at market - and put me straight. Her kitchen was perfectly neat and clean, the dinner all made and keeping warm on the stove, the washing done and dried and ironed. She spoke in whispered tones, as though she might be overheard, and very quickly, as if time was short. At tea time three large lads strode in without taking off their muddy boots or washing their hands and sat themselves down at the table. She leapt up from her seat. ‘Oh, you’ll have to go,’ she squeaked, flapping her apron and almost shooing me out, ‘but do come again,’ she mouthed, before closing the door.

  Soon I was riding further afield, down lanes and up hills, making careful mental note of landmarks so I could find my way home again. One day I found myself in the little market town where the railway station was, and bought myself a cup of tea in café, feeling heady with daring. Afterwards I wheeled my bicycle along the pavements, looking into the shop windows where, I discovered, things I had needed in the past but had to do without, or improvise for myself, or send off for, were readily available. There was a women’s outfitters which sold the kinds of personal requisites which all women need but which are never spoken of. A hardware store displayed all manner of useful things for cleaning and repairs. There was a library. Oh! Joy!

  When I got home that afternoon it was like returning from an enchanted journey to a fantastical country, a place of dreams, which was odd, because, before this, Tall Chimneys had seemed to me to be the place which was remote and charmed, a secret hollow the world had not discovered.

  I personally maintained the gatehouse at all times in readiness for John’s return. Sometimes I went up there and made myself tea in the old pot, and lay on the divan as the sun moved across the windows, and thought about John, and how I missed him. I wrote to him regularly, telling him all my news but, consisting mainly of crops and cobwebs, as it did, it can’t have been very interesting to him. I deliberated over whether to ask him about his wife but, in the end, decided not to. She, like the little market town, like the whole world, really, existed outside of the charmed cauldron of Tall Chimneys. In June I received a letter from him saying an exhibition was imminent and afterwards he intended staying on for the Berlin Olympics. The letter came to me as I sat on the terrace in the afternoon sunshine and altered one of my new skirts. Despite my busy regime I was putting on weight.

  During the course of the summer Colin came back to Tall Chimneys about three times. He brought Ratton with him on each occasion, and usually two or three other gentlemen. They seemed to talk mainly politics and ate and drank more frugally than the party of men who had come at Easter. Once Ratton came without Colin. He brought with him a disreputable-looking lady, much painted and wearing clothes which even I could see were poor quality. She had a high-pitched, heavily-accented voice which set all the crystal tinkling discordantly, drank neat gin even with her meals and left black stains on her pillow - as well as on his - whether from hair dye or eye black, I do not know. I behaved like a dour housekeeper throughout their visit - po-faced and grudging.

  By August it was obvious that my increasing waistline had nothing whatsoever to do with my ravenous appetite. I was pregnant. The knowledge of it came to me one evening as I dried myself after my bath. I stood in Mrs Simpson’s bedroom - it had the deepest bathtub in the most opulent bathroom and was the one I habitually used - and looked at my body in the full length mirror. I had lit the lamps but left the curtains open. The light had a golden, gloaming quality to it, infinitely soft and full of blessing. Outside the open window I could hear the birds arguing about who would sleep where. My limbs were heavy with tiredness but it had been a splendid day; I had cycled up to the village and gone with some of the other women to Clough Farm where the harvest was being brought in. With labour being short this was a job the farmers did co-operatively, all hands to the pump. The women had occupied Ann’s farmhouse kitchen and provided food for the workers. Afterwards we had gone out into the fields and watched the tractors and trailers at work.

  Kenneth had been there, stripped to the waist, his bony back shockingly white against his tanned arms and neck. He was doing running repairs to one of the machines.

  Nearby, two women were setting out jugs of lemonade on a trestle. Their chat was conducted at a louder volume than they had perhaps intended, to penetrate the din of the rattling engine. ‘I hear his mother has set her heart on him marrying Rose,’ one said, nodding towards Kenneth. He paused in his work and wiped his brow with his forearm. I knew he’d heard them although he could not have seen her gesture. ‘Well, who else would have her?’ the woman added.

  ‘Or him?’ her companion had chipped in. I seethed on behalf of my friends. What were they talking about? I thought Kenneth was quite handsome, not to mention finely honed, for a man of his years, and, as for Rose, regardless of her past, she was as beautiful as a pink peony.

  ‘Anyone would be lucky to have either,’ I retorted, loudly, getting up from my seat on the stubble and going to sit elsewhere.

  When the work was done there had been beer and a good deal of flirting and giggling in the long grass at the edges of the fields. I had expected the romance and innuendo and furtive couplings to make me feel discontented but in fact I had felt strangely apart from it all.

  Now, in the bedroom, I looked at my body properly; was I beyond such things? Too old for such shenanigans? My breasts were large and shapely, indeed, heavy and, now that I really looked, mapped with blue veins I did not recall seeing before. The nipples were darker and larger than I remembered. My belly swelled slightly beneath them. I prodded it, curiously; it was hard, without a trace of fat. As I caressed it I felt a tiny flutter in the pit of it, like a bird’s wing settling for sleep, soft and very fragile. I had felt it before, and dismissed it, but now it felt like a sign, a signal from someone trapped underground. ‘Here I am, here I am, here I am,’ it seemed to say. It was like something in the back of memory which seeks to be recalled; a gesture half-seen, half-sensed, just o
ut of eye-line; a snatched line of music which dogs you all the rest of the day as you try to bring it to consciousness. I watched my image frown as I tried to make sense of it and the line in my forehead brought Mrs Simpson powerfully to mind; hers had been almost permanently furrowed. She was to have slept in this room - how long ago? Four months? Five? And the night before she came I had gone to Giles Percy’s room.

  Past and present collided. Even in the evening light, with the lamps glowing, I watched with a kind of detached curiosity as the colour drained from my face. My eyes widened. One hand instinctively went up to my mouth, the other clapped itself onto my stomach. Shock and surprise, disbelief and certainty chased each other round my mind in ever decreasing circles. I felt over-taken and powerless and completely undone. What on earth had I done? What on earth would I do, now? A baby, and I unmarried and without any prospect of becoming so. A baby that was not even John’s. But at the same time I was conscious of an overwhelming, ravening instinct to protect, a fierce sense of possessiveness; this was my baby. And this was the feeling which stayed with me, as I dressed and prepared supper, floating round the kitchen on a cloud of heady delirium; for the very first time, I would have something which was mine, and mine alone.

  John came home in September. He walked into the kitchen as Kenneth was busy servicing the range, elbow deep in soot and grime. Rose was in the larder storing our bottled blackcurrants. John was tanned, much thinner than formerly, and his thick black hair had been cut short. As if to compensate, a bushy beard had sprouted from his chin and cheeks. His suit was crumpled from travel. He looked wild and oddly disreputable, but also vulnerable.